Huygens Quotes

#1. Christiaan Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. "The world is my country," he said, "science my religion.

Carl Sagan

#2. Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.

Carl Sagan

#3. The world is my country. Science my religion.

Christiaan Huygens

#4. I esteem his understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of his work, where the author studies things of little use...

{Writing about Isaac Newton}

Christiaan Huygens

#5. Australia as a nation, as a set of cities and some regional centres, that project died a death and we didn't get it up, but I still think there's merit in that.

Susan Oliver

#6. Sometimes, I get this familiar ache in my heart and a sense of stabbing emptiness around my ribcage. I don't even know what brings it on; it's just familiar like a horrible visitor. What brings me to my knees though, is the even bigger heart-hurt when I recognize this ghastly guest is back again.

Ruby Wax

#7. I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity.

Christiaan Huygens

#8. I'd decided apologies were like Kryptonite to him.

Donna Augustine

#9. We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls Great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorned as Well as our own.

Christiaan Huygens

#10. The world is my country, science is my religion.

Christiaan Huygens

#11. I don't care what size you are or how old you are - once you see the results brought to you by regular exercise, you'll wonder how you survived without it.

Rachel Nichols

#12. Now since in so many Things they ... agree, what can be more probable than that in others they agree too; and that the other Planets are as beautiful and as well stock'd with Inhabitants as the Earth? Or what shadow of Reason can there be why they should not?

Christiaan Huygens

#13. One may conceive light to spread successively, by spherical waves.

Christiaan Huygens

#14. There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment.

Christiaan Huygens

#15. The taste of music with the inhabitants of Venus and Jupiter is at a high level, similar to that of Frenchmen or Italians.

Christian Huygens

#16. It's evident God had no design to make a particular Enumeration in the Holy Scriptures, of all the Works of his Creation.

Christiaan Huygens

#17. I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything ... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.

Orson Welles

#18. Money can be more of a barrier between people than language or race or religion.

Vera Caspary

#19. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

Ray Bradbury

#20. Great difficulties are felt at first and these cannot be overcome except by starting from experiments .. and then be conceiving certain hypotheses ... But even so, very much hard work remains to be done and one needs not only great perspicacity but often a degree of good fortune.

Christiaan Huygens

#21. These Gentlemen must be told, that they take too much upon themselves when they pretend to appoint how far and no farther Men shall go in their Searches, and to set bounds to other Mens Industry; as if they knew the Marks that God has placed to Knowledge ...

Christiaan Huygens

#22. It is surrounded by a thin flat ring, inclined to the ecliptic, and nowhere touches the body of the planet.

Christiaan Huygens

#23. Here we may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her Cost and Finery upon this small Speck of Dirt.

Christiaan Huygens

#24. I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

Christiaan Huygens

#25. I do not mind at all that [Newton] is not a Cartesian provided he does not offer us suppositions like that of attraction.

Christiaan Huygens

#26. The rest of the planets have their dress and furniture, nay and their inhabitants too, as well as this Earth of ours.

Christiaan Huygens